Community Justice

Catalog description

This course examines the origins and framework of the community justice movement as a means to achieve justice and prevent crime within localized jurisdictions, while improving quality of community life. This course prepares students to examine various ideas and strategies, such as community organizing, environmental crime prevention, and public-private/nonprofit partnerships as a means to assist criminal justice agencies in strengthening their relationships with the community in order to build healthy and viable communities, while being more responsive to community needs. Additional topics include exploring the decentralization of authority and accountability within our criminal justice system by encouraging front-line workers to take the initiative in order to solve community problems with a focus on bringing citizens into the justice process as advisers, stakeholders, collaborators and partners. Assignments and projects give students opportunities to examine the role of community justice in the context of distinctions and similarities in the use of informal (as opposed to formal) social control as a more effective means of crime management, while engaging in a critical assessment of the limitations, as well as the future of community justice.